Past Event Category: 2015-2016
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Oct 19Incarcerated Writers and the Justice of Incarceration
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Vincent Lloyd Kingdon Fellow (2015-2016) Religion, Syracuse University It is not only activists and public intellectuals who are concerned about the injustice of mass incarceration in the United States. Incarcerated men and women have examined the “justice” of the American criminal justice system as well, often through memoir. Incarcerated writers do intellectual …
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Oct 12Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Theodore Martin UW System Fellow (2015-2016) English, UW-Milwaukee What do we mean when we call something—art, culture, history—”contemporary”? While scholars tend to refer to the contemporary as if it were the name for a clearly demarcated historical period, the contemporary isn’t really like other historical periods—for the simple reason that, as something …
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Oct 5From Content to Context: Rethinking Relationships between Folklore and Literature in Nineteenth-Century France
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Jennifer Gipson Resident Fellow (2015-2016) French and Italian, UW–Madison What does folklore have to do with literature? The usual answer would involve shared content: writers borrowing song, stories, or motifs from traditional materials. However, the history of folklore study or discourses surrounding it—what people thought folklore was and why it mattered—can be …
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Sep 28Roads as Spaces of Consumption: The Making of Tibetan Highways
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Yongming Zhou Senior Fellow (2014-2018) Anthropology, UW–Madison What are the functions of roads, both “materially” and “symbolically”? Since 1950, several highways have been built to connect Tibet with the rest of China. These roads’ meanings are subject to constant construction and reinterpretation, being understood variously as heroic, monumental, liberating, mysterious, exotic, purifying, …
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Sep 21From the Roman Mediterranean to India: The Early Movement of Christianity through the Afro-Eurasian World System
University Club, Room 212
Monday Seminar: Nathanael Andrade Solmsen Fellow (2015-2016) History, University of Oregon Can we trace the social pathways that ancient Christianity followed as it traveled from the Roman Mediterranean to India? Evidence of these pathways is laden with epistemic baggage. Likewise, numerous societies have produced their own testimonies for Christianity’s movement, but it is often …
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Sep 16What Counts as “Evidence” in Humanities Research?
University Club, Room 212
Panel Discussion: “Humanities by the Numbers” was the theme for the annual conference of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, hosted by the Center for the Humanities in Madison in June. The status of “numbers” in humanities research sparked sharp debate—some attacking the loss of nuance and individualized specificity or uniqueness; some suggesting that …